Chicken 1.92

CHICKEN is a compiler for the Scheme programming language. CHICKEN produces portable, efficient C, supports almost all of the current Scheme language standard, the Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R5RS ), and includes many enhancements and extensions. CHICKEN runs on MacOS X, Windows, and many Unix flavours.
Main features:
- Compiles Scheme to efficient and portable C
- Includes a full-featured interactive interpreter as well as an optimising batch compiler
- Full support for tail recursion, first-class continuations, high-level macros and dynamic-wind
- Highly portable and known to run on many platforms, including IA-32 (80x86), IA-64, PowerPC, SPARC and UltraSPARC, Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, ARM, AMD64 and S/390
- Distributed free for use and modification under the terms of the BSD License
- Transparent support for shared objects and linkage to C
- A sophisticated but easy-to-use Foreign Function Interface for linking C and C++ libraries and classes to Scheme
- Lightweight threads based on first-class continuations
- An object system with multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance and a meta-object protocol
- Common Lisp-style format
- Provides the syntax-case enhanced high-level macro system, R5RS syntax-rules , and define-macro
- Support for syntactic pattern-matching via Andrew Wrights match package
- Execution profiling, debugging and backtrace support
- A clean POSIX interface that covers environment and filesystem access, pipes, processes, signals, locks, sockets, and low-level and memory-mapped I/O
- Support for interpreted or compiled shell scripts under Unix and Windows
- Support for a large number of Scheme Requests For Implementation (SRFIs), some available separately as extensions:
SRFI 0 (cond-expand )
SRFI 1 (List library)
SRFI 2 (and-let* )
SRFI 4 (Homogeneous numeric vector datatypes)
SRFI 6 (Basic string ports)
SRFI 8 (receive )
SRFI 9 (Record types)
SRFI 10 (#, external form)
SRFI 13 (String library)
SRFI 14 (Character set library)
SRFI 16 (case-lambda )
SRFI 17 (Generalized set! )
SRFI 18 (Multithreading support)
SRFI 23 (error )
SRFI 25 (Multidimensional array primitives)
SRFI 26 (cut , cute )
SRFI 28 (format )
SRFI 30 (Block comments)
SRFI 37 (Program argument processor)
SRFI 38 (External representation for data with shared structure)
SRFI 39 (Parameters)
SRFI 40 (Stream library)
SRFI 42 (Eager comprehensions)
SRFI 43 (Vector library)
SRFI 55 (require-extension )
Version restrictions:
- No unlimited-precision integers (bignums), rationals or complex numbers
- Procedures are limited to 126 arguments
- No support for unicode
- Compilation of large files can be slow
Enhancements:
- chicken-setup: better handling when no remote repository file exists